Private roads would use dynamic pricing. Congestion fees during peak hours would reduce traffic and fund maintenance, unlike free but overcrowded highways.
Discussion
407 in Toronto. Costs 50 bucks to drive across a city during rush hours.
I would absolutely subscribe to Amazon Prime Roads Premium
Before Napster ever existed, I once had a job interview with a private toll road on a major California freeway. I know everyone thinks California is for Commies, nowadays, but there's always been a libertarian pocket in Southern California. A guy I know who owns a libertarian bookstore says he used to hang out with Samuel Konklin III in Long Beach and was an AnCap because he thought Konklin was a loser.π€£
Anyway, this private lane was walled off from the adjacent "freeway." To use this private lane, you needed to place a transponder on your window that would charge your credit card an entry fee.
The pricing was dynamic. It might cost 99Β’ at 2:00a.m. and $9.00 at 6:00 p.m. If you had 3 or more people, it was free.
I interviewed for a job with the Toll Roads back when it was a start up. The job required watching all the cars entering the private lane without transpomders. If a car had no transponder, they would be sent a ticket in the mail.
I didn't get the job and it was later co-opted by the state of California, but I thought of this after reading The Machinary of Freedom by David Friedman.
Of course, I was already into bitcoin and read the Age of Cryptocurrency by then, so I basically had a real world example of how the thesis of the book could work. These corporations Friedman describes could work simmilar to the private toll roads. The private company spent capital to build the road. They charged a fee to use that road. They had a free-mium version, a paid version, and a fee market. They hired private security(the job I didn't get). They used the government to enforce contracts, but this could just as easily be done with arbitration or some sort of smart contracts(like over the lightning network, I don't mean BS coins)
It's totally possible to build something like a private carpool lane leveraging app simmilar to an app based taxi.
We could build a private Carpooling nostr client with a reputation system that leverages nostrs web of trust. Carpoolers could pay the driver to commute to work faster today. The technology makes it possible anyway. We can do this with or without the Amazon Prime Subscription fee.
Used very effectively in Thailand.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled-access_highways_in_Thailand
If it weren't for government control, we'd be in flying cars by now.
Doubt it. We'd have dense urban cores linked by rail, like Europe and Asia.
This is what America looked like pre-WWII, after which the government thumbed the scales for cars and jets.
We could have both, and people can choose which mode of transportation they want. Government limits choices. The free market provides more options.
I would argue that a true anarchocapitalist world would, in its built form, look much closer to Europe and Asia (and pre-WWII America for that matter): Dense, walkable urban cores served by streetcars / light rail, with intercity connections largely by high-speed rail.
The current American mode of living of "drive everywhere suburbs" is supported by 75 years of subsidies and regulations, from parking mandates to zoning regulations, all the way up to the US Global Empire to keep oil flowing.
Take all that away, and suburbs don't pencil out.
Private roads would just be profit gauging the same as government roads.
@korg what was implemented in downtown new york. Something about new tolls to enter downtown
These exist in civilized places
I drive some private highways sometimes, they're clean and fast. But they don't charge based on congestion. Just a few cents to pass.